13 page printout, page 195 - 207
CHAPTER XI
Phallic Elements in Religion
Modern Modesty -- phallism in the Old Testament --
The Phallic Stage -- Phallism Under Christianity
MODERN MODESTY
SCIENCE enables you to see the world grow. It produces a slow
moving-picture of the unfolding of the epic of the universe.
History enables you to see humanity grow. It produces a slow
moving-picture of the unfolding of the drama of the race. The
picture afforded by history is a part, selected and enlarged, of
the great scientific picture of all reality. History is a brand of
science.
In the moving-picture which history offers us no scene or
series of scenes is so fascinating as the correct delineation of
the progress of religion through the ages; and I would venture to
say that the most piquant episode in the religious story is the
growth of what is called "Christian reticence" precisely at a time
when, and in proportion as, Christianity is disappearing.
There is nothing quite so amusing amongst the clotted errors
of clerical eloquence as the suggestion that our manners will
become grosser, our sex-impulses will burst every frail check and
pour out like molten lava, if the old religion is discarded. Our
manners have the delicacy of a painting by Watteau, of a fine
Dresden vase, of an essay by Walter Pater, in comparison with the
manners of our Christian predecessors.
As I walk the streets of London, I see prints and caricatures
from the eighteenth century exhibited in the windows of curio
shops. The police ignore them only because they are antiquities.
The legs of fat Hanoverian dames and slim demi-mondaines are shown
in every phase of disorder of clothing. I go to see plays by
Fletcher; and only the boldest ladies will now venture to hear
phrases which once made all London rock with laughter. I read "Tom
Jones," or the plays of Sheridan, or "Venus and Adonis" and certain
comedies of Shakespeare; and then I hear that an author has been
dismissed from the French Academy for writing "La Garconne," and
that the police of Los Angeles have arrested an entire theatrical
company for playing "Desire Under the Elms."
The irony of this new modesty -- I mean, of this growth of
modesty amidst the visible failing of the religion which claims to
have a monopoly of it -- breaks upon one overpoweringly when one
approaches the subject of the present chapter. If you reflect, you
soon perceive that coarseness of phraseology lingers longest in
religious literature. A Catholic maid would hardly mention the word
"womb" in conversation except under compulsion and with a blush;
but she repeats every night in the prayers, "Blessed is the fruit
of the womb, Jesus." A good Protestant maid would have paralysis of
the vocal organs if she tried to say whore"; but it confronts her
in her Bible, and flows sonorously from the lips of her preachers,
over and over again. "Fornication" has almost dropped out of the
dictionary; but not out of the Bible.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
195
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
And these are but a few fragments of a great sex-candor which
in earlier ages characterized all religion. An American maid wears
a ring or a broach with the name "mizpah" on it. She thinks,
vaguely, that it is a charm, an omen of good luck. What in reality
is it?
The learned dictionary sends you, or ought to send you, to the
thirty-first chapter of Genesis. The Hebrew text has been
discreetly translated, but you read plainly enough the following
story: Jacob, the chosen of the Lord, has fled from his father-in-
law, stealthily, with all his goods. Rachel, the chosen of Jacob,
has stolen her father's "images": that is to say, the crude models
of sex-organs to which Laban prays for the fertility of his cattle
and wines. Laban follows in pursuit, to recover his precious
carvings, and Rachel sweetly sits on them, on her camel, and lies
to her father, saying that she has her monthly visitation and
cannot rise. So Laban is cheated; and he and Jacob raise up a stone
pillar, -- that is, a rough image of the phallus, and swear on that
sacred object what they will do to each other if either misbehaves
again. And that is Mizpah; which the sweet young maid fingers
tenderly on her ring on the way to church.
It is amazing what the world has forgotten and how, having
forgotten, it has made fairy tales of the past. Christian
reticence! Why, in the Middle Ages, when everybody who liked not
the smell of his own burning flesh was a Christian, people handled
phallic images as coolly as a medical student handles dead frogs.
There were towns in the south of France where wax models of male
organs hung in such bunches from the rafters of the church that
when a wind blew, the worshipers complained that they were
disturbed by the rattling.
There were towns in the center of France where, amongst the
holy relics in the sacristy, was a withered thing which the priests
represented to be the authentic phallus of the patron saint of the
great church; and the end of it was red with the libations of wine
which pious women had poured upon it.
There were towns in the north of France -- I choose
especially, "the eldest daughter of the Church" -- where ancient
phallic idols had been turned into Christian saints, and had become
objects of intense veneration. There were towns in Italy where,
under the eyes of the Papacy (until Voltaireanism spread to Italy
at the end of the eighteenth century), wax phallic images were, on
the saint's great feast day, sold to women by the thousand and
presented by them, unblushing, to the priests. There were scores of
churches in Ireland where a woman with exposed parts was carved on
the door for every woman and child to see. There were churches in
England and churches in Spain with the same very pronounced lack of
Christian reticence.
I will return later to these relics of phallic cult under the
Christian rule. Some lingered until the great Rationalists of the
eighteenth century grew strong. Some lingered, where Rationalism
had no influence, until recent times. And now -- in this age of
Materialism and Skepticism and Neo-paganism -- the police would not
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
196
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
permit us to reproduce photographs of such of these religious
symbols as we still have; and we have to cloak our very words with
the veil of pagan languages to express these facts of the religious
life!
By "phallic elements in religion" I mean the worship of the
human generative powers and of carvings or models of the human sex-
organs. Rabelais, in the pious Middle Ages, found twenty current
words for everything connected with sex. In our "degenerate" days
there is not one which we consider it decent to use. This short
chapter will be mainly concerned with the veneration of models of
the male organ; and I have to speak of it as the phallos or penis
or lingam, which are, respectively, the Greek, Latin, and Hindu
names for it. I am concerned to a less extent with the religious
veneration of models of the female organ; and this must be spoken
of as the pudenda or the yoni, the Latin and Hindu names. Finally,
if, following the custom of learned experts, I have at times to
speak of "ithyphallic," I must not venture to explain more closely
than to say that the Greek word ithys means "straight" or "straight
up.
These things are not mere technicalities. They suggest a most
important truth: that, contrary to the dogmatic conviction of
orthodox people,. outspokenness about sex has been allied to
religion almost all through the ages until modern times. What
modern divine would write to ladies as St. Jerome, the greatest
ascetic of the fourth century, wrote to the aristocratic Christian
ladies of his day? What theologian or preacher would now dare to
draw an illustration, as St. Augustine did, from the fimus
infantis, or say that Priapus was deified propter magnitudinem
instrumenti sui? To translate those phrases literally I should have
to use words that have not appeared in print since the seventeenth
century. And after the fourth century manners became grosser.
Abelard, the most brilliant scholar of the Middle Ages, was
castrated by the hirelings of a canon of the Paris cathedral.
Saintly monks slept with saintly nuns to prove their self-control.
Women penitents were driven thorough the street in their smocks;
and men were paraded in women's skirt lift d above the waist. But
the list would be endless. We shall see enough of this later.
Why, then, it may be asked, disturb or offend this new modesty
of the world, a product of Rationalist days, by going back over
these strange sexual aberrations of religion? We have purified
modern literature so much that -- to quote a case within my
knowledge -- the English postal police open books from Germany and
send back serious scientific works on sex; and their American
colleagues imitate the prudery. We have forced Polynesian maids to
wear our linens and calicoes: and die of pneumonia. We have tried
to make even the Hindus hide their lingam and yoni. Never was there
such a campaign of modesty in the world before.
A recent writer on Phallism says that to deal with religion
and omit the phallic elements is like trying to produce "Hamlet"
without the Prince of Denmark. We need not go so far. It is enough
that phallic elements have had an extraordinary part in the
development of religion, and it would be mere pedantry or prudery
to ignore them. We may admit that some writers on the subject have
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
197
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
exaggerated. They see phallic emblems in the bishop's mitre, the
crozier, the church steeple and bell, the Catholic pyx and
monstrance, the crescent and the cross, the mortar and pestle, and
a thousand other things. It cannot even be regarded as proved that
the cross is, as they say, an emblem of phallic origin, though it
seems probable.
But apart from all these speculations, the phallic content of
religion, in every continent, in all ages, has been extraordinary;
and when nature-religions with such a content become ethical
religions, the mingling of ancient "impurity" with the new zeal for
"purity" affords one of the most grotesque spectacles in the human
comedy. In ancient Babylonia, with all its zeal for purity, there
seems to have been still some practice of sacred prostitution. We
must trace steadily the growth of sexual religion which explains
these and other phenomena.
The study will be of interest and importance also in helping
us to understand ethical ideas about sex. There is a particular
need for elucidating our ideas, for some strain of ancient thought
still influences our moral judgments and leads to one of the most
singular paradoxes of our time: the growth of a rebellion against
"morality" in a generation which is the most moral the world has
yet seen. We shall be much better able to understand this when we
have studied the relation of religion to sex.
But is it worth while? Are we not merely poking into obscure
corners of the religious past in search of these aberrations of the
human mind? Not in the least. One of the most recent writers on the
subject, Clifford Howard, observes that there are more than a
hundred million actual phallic worshipers today in India alone, and
three times as many in the world ("Sex Worship"). One of the
leading British authorities on the science of religion, Sidney
Hartland, shows in a long article (Phallism) in the "Dictionary of
Ethics and Religion," that the phallic cult has spread over the
entire world in all ages. The most recent writer on the subject,
J.B. Hannay -- not to speak of older authorities like Payne Knight
and General Farlong -- traces phallism into nearly every field of
the religious life. But we will at once establish the importance of
the, subject from the point of view of this book, by tracing
phallic elements in the Bible itself.
PHALLISM IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
In the book of Exodus (xxv 10, to xxvii 19, and xxxvi 8, to
xxxviii 31) there are two long descriptions of the "Tabernacle" or
glorified tent, which was the Hebrew place of worship until Solomon
is supposed to have built his gorgeous temple.
As I show in "The Forgery of the Old Testament," Exodus is a
fifth-century forgery, very obviously fabricated by the Jewish
priests when they saw, and were envious of, the power of the
Babylonian priests. But this description is so minute and precise
that readers of the Bible have, until modern times, never had the
least doubt that it was written at the time of the making of the
Tabernacle. We now see, on examining the account closely, not only
that the material could not possibly have been got by the Hebrews
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
198
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
in "the desert," but that the details of the construction are
contradictory and the whole plan impracticable. It is a sheer
literary fiction by a priest with a lively imagination.
But there is one point in this fiction, ignored by the learned
critical divines, to which J.B. Hannay calls attention. Read your
Exodus, xxvi. The great tent was to have a covering of goats'
skins, of "rams' skins dyed red," and of "badgers' skins." The last
word is, notoriously, a mistranslation of an obscure word, and Mr.
Hannay suggests "dolphins' skins." In any case, these coverings
are, if you can find your way amongst the bewildering details of
the description, so drawn over at one end to meet in a closed slit
through which the high priest forces his way dramatically during
the great festival, that, if you care to draw the result (inner
layer of fine skins, round this sheepskin dyed red, and round this
hairy goat skin) with a child's colored crayons, you will burn the
drawing at once, lest your wife or daughter see it.
Mr. Hannay, whose learning and industry are prodigious, is one
of those phallic writers who find the emblems everywhere; but I do
not see how any person can read these details and not admit the
phallic meaning. The "Tabernacle" never existed, except on paper,
but divines justly conclude that there was some sort of large tent
for the "ark of the covenant" during the wandering in the desert
and until some sort of temple was built by somebody. The priestly
writer of Exodus seems to have incorporated and glorified the
description of this tent in his piece of fiction. It was phallic.
When you realize what the "Feast of Tabernacles" was, you are
more disposed to believe this. The Greek writer Plutarch must have
shocked the Jews of his time by describing it, quite honestly, as
a Dionysiac festival: a feast in honor of the Hebrew equivalent of
the god Dionysus or Bacchus. In effect, it was. Even conservative
divines admit that it was the harvest festival; and so it is clear
that the priests, in recasting the religion and history of the
Jews, had seized upon this old and popular festival and -- as was
done all over the world -- given it a new religious meaning. It was
to be celebrated in memory of the sojourn in tents in the desert.
It was the gayest of all Jewish feasts. For seven days the
people lived in tents, made of the branches of olive, pine, myrtle,
and palm trees, on the roofs of their houses or in the streets and
open spaces. Wine and love were, as in harvest festivals all the
world over, the chief rites of the great festival. Little bowers of
fragrant vine and myrtle branches were inspiring places of retreat
for the young folk. There were mysterious libations, which no one
now understands; but libations constitute one of the chief and most
significant rites of the phallic cult. There was a grand
illumination of the women's court at night. There was continual
music and dancing. And there were mysterious wands or rods of
intertwined branches to be borne in the hand by everybody; just as
in the Greek Baccbanalia, the great feast of wine and sex.
If it seems to anybody that this sex-element was just a human
importation into a purely "religious" festival, let us invite him
to turn back to the really older parts of the Old Testament. The
priestly writers of Exodus lived, as their language alone would
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
199
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
suffice to show, only about 500 B.C.; though bits of more archaic
language are embedded in their work. These oldest sections are two
documents, cut into fragments and put in a piece here and a piece
there, known as the Jahvist and Elohist documents. They may go back
to the tenth century, and are chiefly used in Genesis. Naturally,
they have been modified by the later priestly compilers, but we
shall see that they are still eloquent. Palestine was one great
region of phallic cult, and the early Hebrews were as naive and
jealous in it as their neighbors.
You never noticed this? You think that it may be one of these
fanciful interpretations of modern scholars? Well, one reason why
the ordinary Bible reader may escape noticing it is that the
English translation of the Old Testament, though gross enough in
its sonorous language about whoring and fornication, really tones
down the original. The Hebrew text itself had, in fact, been
modified by the Rabbis who expressly said that much of it required
"modernizing," as we say, even two thousand years ago. The
"revealed" word was too crude to meet the merely pagan eye of other
nations.
Sometimes, in fact, the translation of the text is legitimate
enough, yet it really conceals the grossness of the writer and of
those for whom he wrote. "Male and female created he them," says
Genesis (i, 27). What is wrong with that? Only that the word
nequebah, which is translated "female," means "the thing to be
bored"; and that was the ancient Hebrew conception of woman -- that
and nothing more. (The word for male, zakhar, is, by the way, given
by some phallic writers as meaning "borer." This is incorrect. It
means "memory"). The story of the Fall is just as crudely sexual.
But we will avoid subtleties, and take a broad view of this
early history embedded in the fiction of Genesis. I give up in
despair "the sons of God" who had intercourse with "the daughters
of men," and begot a race of giants and of people so wicked that
God had to destroy nearly the whole race. Apparently the human
race, though cursed from the start, would have got on tolerably
morally if these mysterious "sons of God" had not interfered with
its daughters. The whole of this is, however, Babylonian fiction,
as we have seen. What one might plausibly claim to be to some
extent a history of the Hebrews begins in Chapter xii.
Notice, however, a very peculiar episode in Chapter ix. the
well-known story of the curse of Ham (and the black race). Noah
"was drunken. and he was uncovered within his tent." Ham had some
reason to go in, and he "saw the nakedness of his father, and told
his two brethren without." Just what any youth would do. Yet we are
asked to believe that these two Hebrew youths in the semi-barbaric
period of the race walked backward to cover their father, that Noah
"knew what his younger son had done unto him," and that God's heavy
curse fell upon the frivolous Ham and his posterity forever!
Daniel, the great king, danced naked centuries afterwards before
all the people and God. Prophets stalked the land naked, and were
proud of it. But we are asked to believe that in the very crudest
days of the race there was a sexual delicacy equal to that of the
most refined home in modern Philadelphia!
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
200
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
There is here some mystery, surely. Some of the old Rabbis
said that what Ham really did was to castrate his father; and they
point out that Noah dies in the next verse. As, however, Noah is
understood to have been about nine hundred and fifty years old (and
the "boys" about nine hundred) ... We will not try to fathom the
mystery this way. A modern scholar, Dr. Maurer, suggests in an
article on Hebrew phallism (in the German "Globus," 1907) that the
real meaning is that sex was tabu in ancient Judea. I should say
that it was precisely the opposite, and that Ham (if there is
anything at all in the old story) did commit some outrage; and we
shall at once see that this is more likely.
In Chapter xxiv, 2, Abraham calls his eldest servant and says:
"Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh," by way of a solemn
oath. Israel (xlvii, 29) even in civilized Egypt calls his
distinguished son Joseph to swear a solemn oath in the same
peculiar way. Naturally the translation is euphemistic. The most
solemn oath of the Hebrews -- and they had a great variety -- was
to swear with your hand on a man's testicles. It is a familiar
oriental idea, common amongst the Arabs in recent times, and
curiously enough the Latin word for those organs and for witnesses
is, as we see in our words "'testicles" and "testimony," the same.
Which again raises a suspicion that "the ark of the testimony"
was a receptacle, representing the female organ, containing male
emblems. Phallic writers are sure of this, but we cannot prove it.
What was in the "ark" was a deadly secret: though later
priestly writers said that their legendary "tables of the law" were
in it. Modern divines scout the idea that the law would be thus
stored in secret, and say that old sacred stones of some sort or
other were in the box. And when we learn that phallic stones were
sacred all over the region, and that, on one occasion, when enemies
stole the ark, the punishment took the form of widespread syphilis
(euphemistically translated "emerods"), there is reasonable ground
to conclude that the center of the original Hebrew religion was a
phallic emblem. The ark and its contents mysteriously disappeared
when, at the time of the Babylonian captivity, the priests
fabricated a more civilized religion.
In short, the old Hebrew religion was saturated with phallic
elements until it was destroyed in the fifth century, under the
inspiration of Persia and Babylonia. The Old Testament, though
notoriously a fifth-century compilation, plainly tells us the
situation.
THE PHALLIC STAGE
The phallic cult blends with the most intense desires of man
himself. The worship and propitiation of other gods is a necessary
evil, a burden. It is purely utilitarian. But the cult of the god
of love is in the most perfect harmony with man's most powerful
impulse. The human element mingles with the religious. The phallus
grows larger, the orgy more frequent.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
201
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
That is one of the reasons for the universality and intensity
of the phallic cult, and for the obstinacy with which it persists
under and defeats ethical religions like the Hebrew, the
Babylonian, the Egyptian, and even the Christian. Man really
believes in the efficacy of the cult; but he also likes it. So the
phallic cult has never been destroyed, It lingered in Europe openly
until this skeptical age created modesty. But in our own day it is
simply assuming new forms -- close dancing, the revue, new music,
sex-novels and so on -- just as in the most religious of Christians
(saintly nuns, etc.) it assumed new forms. Let us turn to Asia, and
we find the phallic cult, even in our own time, as intense as ever,
and very impatient of European and American restraints. In the
Mongolian world it is not pronounced. Sex flows in well-ordered
channels; the domestic life and the quite respectable brothel. It
is as intense as elsewhere, but it long ago ceased to have a
special religious significance.
Japan, which was civilized long after China, is more
instructive. When the country began to be modernized in the early
seventies, Americans were astounded to find, amongst one of the
most sober and virtuous nations of the globe, an open and common
exhibition of phallic emblems. In many of the old Shinto temples
the statues of the gods were ithyphallic. Missionaries pronounced
them obscene, and they disappeared. But the Japans could scarcely
even understand what the missionaries meant. A friend of mine who
lived in Japan in those early days told me that the people of a
certain coast-village were told that, in deference to the peculiar
feeling of these English and Americans, there must be no more mixed
bathing, nude, in the summer time. So they, instead of making
costumes, separated the sexes by a rope.
But India is the classic land of phallic worship. There is no
doubt that the Hindus took over the phallic gult from this original
population of the peninsula. In all the islands south of India we
find an intense phallic cult. In the Barbar Archipelago we find a
symbol of the sun in the shape of a man with stuffed phallus and
testicles, and it is honored with orgies of sexual enjoyment. The
man has a club which (as in most of the analogous cases, Hercules,
etc.) originally represented a phallus. Phallism is often thus
associated with sun-worship. In this case it is also associated
with the crocodile, the emblem of bravery. The most religious needs
of the tribes are progeny and strength. "The gods we serve are the
gods who serve us." said the great American Pragmatist.
In the Nias Islands, off Sumatra, the natives draw ithyphallic
figures of their ancestors on the walls of their houses, and pray
to them for progeny. In New Guinea -- a much lower level, the
Melanesian, at which phallism begins -- certain tribes have special
sleeping places for the youths and unmarried men. It sounds
cloistral and virtuous; but in point of fact the walls are covered
with ithyphallic figures of men and of sexual intercourse.
Celebes is a hot-bed of phallism: or was, until the Dutch
began a campaign against it. Female figures with exaggerated
breasts and pudenda and ithyphallic figures of males were carved
all over the temples. In some temples the detached organs were
represented in the act of commerce. In southern Celebes there is a
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
202
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
phallic deity, Karaeng lowe, who has a body of priestesses, and is
served with flowers and candles, especially on the two great annual
festivals. Karaeng Iowe is a general god, but the deity of
fertility in particular; and his usual emblems are the male and
female organs. Ithyphallic gold figures also are found. Other
tribes of the island have a god whose name actually means "the
Phallus of the Ulisiwa." In old days the natives had an ithyphallic
statue of him seven feet high which was regarded with great pride
and veneration. When the Dutch interfered with the cult, the
natives hid the statue and worshiped it secretly for years.
Java also is intensely phallic. In some parts it is customary,
at the time of the blossoming of the rice, for the proprietor of
the field and his wife to go round it naked and have intercourse on
it. This half-magical, half-religious recipe for a good harvest was
not unknown in medieval Europe.
An amusing illustration of the inveterate phallism of the
Javaness is given by an old writer. The Dutch had left an old
cannon in a field, and the belief spread that it was a phallic god
of the Europeans. Rice and fruit were offered to it and, with the
full encouragement of the local priests, it was worshiped daily.
Barren women, particularly, sought its aid. They would deck
themselves in their best clothes -- which are extremely elaborate
and handsome in Java -- and sit astride it, often two at a time, to
the great amusement of European laymen and the scandal of the
missionaries. The Dutch government was compelled to remove the
deity.
PHALLISM UNDER CHRISTIANITY
Let us say at once that Christianity, when it got the power,
abolished all public manifestations of a phallic cult. That was of
the very essence of its message. On its ethical side it was part of
the reaction, felt throughout the Greco-Roman world, against the
cult of sex. Apollonius of Tyana, Plutarch, Dion Chrysostom,
Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Julian, Seneca -- the world was full of
moralists and ascetics denouncing these things. The religions of
Mithra, Serapis, and Manichaeus, and the philosophies of the
Platonists and Neo-Platonists, the Stoics, and the Epicureans, were
all trying to abolish them; and with more success than Christianity
until the church got and used political power.
I am trying to give all relevant facts and to avoid all
excesses of language or judgment. Christianity was bound to
denounce phallism because it was in large part a campaign against
sex-pleasure, if not all pleasure, and because it did not care a
cent about the social aspect of fertility and progeny. It cut the
two roots of phallism: the individual love of pleasure and the
social concern about the supply of citizens and soldiers. I do not
admire it for either stroke; but this is no place to decide between
the "lilies and languors of virtue" and "the roses and raptures of
vice."
Our modern age would probably coldly judge that the
suppression of the phallic cult was quite sensible -- these old
semi-magical forms to secure fertility were childish and futile but
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
203
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
nothing to get excited about, and it was a pity sober men instead
of ascetical fanatics had not charge of the work. The temples and
graves of Ephesus, Antioch, Baalbek, Alexandria, etc., were
"purified"; that is to say, a vast amount of beautiful works of art
were destroyed. Women no longer sat on the organ of Priapus; but
they were driven to the opposite and more deplorable extreme of
forswearing love for life under the promise of a larger share of a
legendary heaven. Matrons no longer gave each other phallic cakes;
but they had to go to church, like criminals, after childbirth to
be purified."
And the vicious element in this puritan reaction was not long
concealed. I am not going here to follow some of the writers on
phallism in their discovery of phallic emblems all through the new
religion. Christ called Cephas "Peter," they say; which means a
"rock" -- the Old Testament phallic term! It is waste of time. If
Christ ever did this -- he certainly did not -- phallic
significance would be the last thing in his mind. He loathed sex,
probably being an Essenian monk. Then there is the Holy Spirit as
a dove: precisely the emblem of the phallic goddess! Yes: also the
bird of Noah's ark and the emblem of innocence, the Moslem bird of
peace, and so on.
So it is with the fish, the ring, the mitre, the staff, the
nave of a church, etc., etc. Those who wish may look for phallic
significance in them. Even the cross was certainly not phallic in
the mind of the early Christians; and it is impossible to find any
positive evidence of its having a phallic origin. Cretans and
Egyptians and others had it ages before the Christians. I have seen
a perfect Greek cross in marble in the little chapel at Cnossos
(Crete); and it is certainly fifteen hundred years older than the
Greek church. We do not know what it meant; but it does not in the
slightest degree suggest sex organs and was clearly not phallic.
The Egyptian cross is more suggestive. It is plausible that this
was originally a sex-emblem; and that is all we can say about it.
I turn to a far more serious and substantial point.
Christianity nominally suppressed phallism on its positive side. It
began to get power after the conversion of Constantine, in the
fourth century. By the end of the fourth century all the phallic
temples had gone up in smoke. By the end of the fifth century all
the "pagans" (villagers) even had ceased to worship Cybele,
Astarte, Aphrodite, Isis, Venus, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Taminuz,
Dionysus, and all the rest of the unholy family. Mary was
substituted for Cybele-Isis-Ishtar; Jesus replaces Mithra-Tammuz-
Osiris. The "pale Galilean" -- or, rather, a pale priest at Milan
named Ambrose -- had conquered.
But Christianity was itself essentially an expression of the
negative result of phallism, the ascetic reaction against it; and
the result was deplorable. If Christianity had really won the
world, as believers think, if Christian virtue had generally
replaced pagan vice, we should still have to lay a tremendous
indictment against it. The Protestant at last discovered the
blunder, he might say the blasphemy, of all this fasting and hair-
shirting and celibacy, and so on; but he never noticed the ghastly
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
204
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
futile sacrifices which the Christian creed had meantime imposed
upon the race for a thousand years -- that is to say, if his
version of the triumph of Christianity is true.
I have referred to the great temple of Aphrodite at Paphos, in
Cyprus, where a white conical stone, anointed in feast-days, was
the emblem of the goddess. Paphos is now Kuklia: one of these
miserable villages which for two thousand years have sprawled over
the site of all the glory of the Greco-Roman world. As late as 1896
a British traveler, D.G. Hogarth, describing his visit to Kuklia
("A Wandering Scholar in the Levant"), wrote that he found the
peasants of the district still, once a year, solemnly anointing the
corner stones of the ruined temple of Apbrodite! They recited
charms, and made passes through perforated stones, to remove the
barrenness of their women and increase the virility of their men.
Moslems and Christians joined in the phallic rites, and both said
that they did this "in honor of the maid of Bethlehem."
And this survival of the phallic cult in its most naked form
is typical of what happened all over Europe and the Near East. I
have said that the most orgiastic of the phallic cults, that of
Dionysus, came to Greece from Thrace, which was then a part of
primitive, barbaric Europe. As late as the year 1906 (I cannot
ascertain if it continues, but probably), the Greek Christians in
the village round Viza, which is the old capital of Thrace (Bizye),
had annually a kind of sacred drama or pantomime, in which the
chief performer had a large wooden phallus. Girls represented
"brides," and he chased them, and captured and "married" one. He
and the girl then danced "obscenely" in the streets and collected
money; and the whole affair ended in a general orgy.
At the other end of Europe, in Scandinavia, the phallus
similarly figured in popular plays until recent times. In Ireland
the female figure pointing to or contemplating her pudenda, known
to Celtic scholars as Sheila-na-gig, was often inserted in the
keystone of the arch of the church-door -- to avert the evil eye.
There was one until recent years on a doorway of Cloyne Cathedral,
in Cork. There is one exhibited in the Royal Irish Academy at
Dublin.
There were similar figures on churches, in Britain (and in
Spain). The Reformation has destroyed most of them, but Dr.
Hartland mentions one in Herefordshire and another in Cornwall.
There are phallic stones still surviving in many parts of England.
A photograph of one in Dorsetshire lies before me: a four-foot high
realistic model of the penis. In the same county, on Trendle Hill,
is the figure, but in the turf, of the "Cerne Giant," one hundred
and eighty feet long: a nude giant with monstrous phallus and a
club (a phallus). It is still cleaned every seven years. And every
English village once had its "May-Pole," which, whether its
significance was locally remembered or not, seems unquestionably to
have been originally phallic.
These, you may say, are remote things that may have escaped
the vigilant eye of Rome (on the door of a cathedral!). Let us get
nearer to Rome; and the nearer we go, the worse it is.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
205
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
At Isernia, in the Abruzzi, there used to be an extremely
popular festival every year on the feast of Sts. Cosmas and Damian;
saints of very equivocal origin. People flocked from all parts,
particularly barren women and people with venereal disease. The
stalls in the streets were covered with phallic images in wax, and
the women bought them and presented them in church. Men and women
with venereal disease bared themselves, and were smeared by the
priests with the holy oil of the saints. This went on, and had gone
on from time immemorial, until the ring of Voltairean laughter
compelled the Vatican to interfere in 1780.
At Alatri, much nearer Rome, there are phalli on the walls of
the buildings (and were formerly in other parts of Italy). Now, on
Easter Sunday, it is the fashion to turn out and stone the wicked
emblems. But, since they still survive, one can easily gather how
short a time it is since this custom began. Christian Italy kissed
the phalli: semi-Rationalist Italy stones them. And, as Dr.
Hartland observes, you will probably find women and girls in the
crowd of laughing "zealots" wearing little gold phalli as amulets.
In the ancient form of a closed fist with the thumb peeping out
between the first and second fingers (the fico) this phallic emblem
is still very common among the Catholic peasantry. In the Portici
Museum there is an old altar vessel with a woman embracing a
phallus engraved on it. At Trani a Priapean figure, known as "the
holy member" figured until recently in the carnival.
You will note how these are all remnants of the medieval past
which the church is now hiding. How extensive the cult was in the
Middle Ages is best seen in France, where the Protestantism of the
Huguenots has called our attention to such things.
When, in 1585, the Protestants took Embrun, they found in the
sacristy an object, reddened at the end by libations of wine poured
on it by barren women, which the priests had from time immemorial
represented as the phallus of St. Foutin. The saint was said to
have been the first Christian bishop of Lyons, and his cult spread
over the entire region. Wax models of his celebrated organ were
everywhere. Churches in the south of France had bunches of phalli
hanging like candles from the roof. Sex cakes were sold and
exchanged as freely as in ancient Greece. Barren women used to go
out to the ancient (Neolithic) standing stones and rub against
them. In fact, any upright stone would do; and in places the
statues of the saints were found more convenient.
Who "St. Foutin" really was we can guess from the cult of "St.
Guerlichon" (or Greluchon) in the Diocese of Bourges. The saint was
an ancient ithyphallic statue so popular that the monks had to
Christianize it and give it a legend. Women scraped a little off
his phallus and drank it in water. In very many places in France
and Belgium the phallic cult survived in this way. St. Ters in
Belglum, St. Giles in Brittany, St. Rini of Anjou, and other famous
saints of "the land of saints" grew out of old ithyphallic statues.
That of St. Arnaud wore an apron, which was lifted only for barren
women. At Orange, in the church of St. Eutropius, there was a
wooden phallus covered with leather. It was greatly venerated and
sought.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
206
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
These are a few indications of the failure of the church to
suppress phallism in practice. Rome officially stamped out the
phallic cult; and Rome quietly winked at it everywhere. And this is
only part of the immense story of the vagaries of the phallic
sentiment under the Roman repression. Witchcraft was a Europe-wide
result. The Flagellants of the Middle Ages -- the crowds that went
about scourging themselves from the thirteenth to the sixteenth
centuries -- were phallic. The dancing mania was an expression of
the morbidly repressed sex-sentiment. The unnatural vice which
spread over the whole clerical world when celibacy was enforced,
the almost universal license of nuns and monks, and at the other
end of the scale, the fantastic "ecstasies" of nuns like St.
Catherine and St. Teresa and the fearful self-mutilation of holy
monks, were all outcomes of the attempt to repress sex.
All that we can say is that the ancient phallic cults were
dead because the ancient phallic deities were dead: because
Christians now naturally looked to God and Mary to remove their
barrenness -- as a rule. But do not imagine that this led to a
purification of the sex-morals of Europe.
**** ****
THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
by
Joseph McCabe
1929
**** ****
The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
and information for today. If you have such books, magazines,
newspapers, pamphlets, etc. please contact us with condition and
price, we need to give them back to America.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
207